Drug Discovered By Louisville Professor Could Be Breakthrough Treatment Of Coronavirus

Several years ago Dr. Paula Bates, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Louisville made a breakthrough, discovering a drug able to kill cancer cells.

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The drug, a synthetic DNA that binds to a protein that’s on the surface of cancer cells, was developed and tested on cancer patients.

Over the last two months as the coronavirus pandemic has ramped up, Dr. Bates has been trying to find out if that same drug could help in the fight against coronavirus.

“As you can imagine not everybody is allowed to work with this new coronavirus. It’s dangerous so it has to be done in specialized facilities so all of this work is being done in our BSL 3 biosafety level three labs,” she said.

Bates has been working with Dr. Kenneth Palmer and other colleagues at UofL to do a test in cells and see if the drug was able to block the coronavirus infection. She says fortunately it was able to. Because of that they’re hoping to move forward quickly to human clinical trials.

“Typically developing a drug from scratch takes many, many years and you would have to do a lot of animal testing to try and show it’s safe. Then you test for safety in humans, and then you test if it works in humans. And then the whole process takes years. Because this has already been tested in humans, in cancer patients and we would plan to use it and dose it in a very similar way for patients who have COVID-19 we’re hoping we can kind of chop a lot of time off there,” she said.

Bates also says they don’t believe there are any serious side effects either. Still they’d have to get FDA approval to start clinical trials.

“But with the urgency of the current situation, the FDA are moving very fast, a lot of pharmaceutical companies are moving very fast and so we think we can get this into human clinical trials very quickly within months rather than years,” she said.

She reminds that it could be a year to 18 months before a vaccine becomes available so this could be a good alternative for treatment. She also says it would be for people positive for the virus rather than a preventative drug.

“They could get this early to kind of stop the virus from spreading in their bodies and that would stop them hopefully from getting seriously ill from this but also for people who have already gotten seriously ill, there are some evidence to believe that if you can kind of reduce the amount of virus in the body, reduce the spread further, you might be able to benefit them.”

They’ll seek FDA approval and then try to raise the funding for a clinical trial.

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